izigame.me

Cassette Beasts starts off executing well on 'quirky, progressive indie game' staples; the sorts of character designs, colour palette, musical style (done particularly well), retro touches, and implied values that suggests are all there. The game definitely wears its heart on its sleeve with respect to those values, with a modernised take on monsters types seeing things like plastic types being converted to poison types by fire attacks, and an enemy group of what are apparently vampires that turn out to be estate agents looking to monetise an otherwise cooperative society. That's a good thing in my opinion, contrary to a couple of the usual troglodytes crying about the game being 'woke' in negative reviews. Better than bland, say-nothing media.
It's not all style, though: the game seems to have a really good amount of substance from what I've played so far. The battle system is very solid and comes with all sorts of options. The decision to have type advantages and disadvantages cause various unique effects rather than numerical bonuses is excellent (even if it does mean it's taking me a while to learn them all!), and the action point system combined with highly modifiable, interactive movesets has made even early fights pretty interesting. There are plenty of monsters to collect, and several different types of special fights beyond the usual wild monsters and other collectors, with ranger captains (effectively, gym leaders), rogue fusions (the fusion system doesn't seem that big an aspect of the game for players, but makes for good enemies), and 'archangels' as particularly strong bosses.
So far the world is the only thing I've got mixed feelings on. In concept, the setting is pretty cool, but in practice exploring has been somewhat underwhelming. The overworld graphics don't mesh together too well, with pixel-sprite characters, very blocky but technically 3D environments, and jarring examples of fully 3D items like movable rocks in those environments. The rest of the game's art is good - I like the pixel art and animation for the monsters, and I like the drawn character designs, but the overworld isn't very cohesive. It also feels a bit artificial with everything being so rectangular, and while a good amount is packed in and exploration is made dynamic through puzzles and verticality, the actual distances between locations in the overworld is small, making things feel cramped. The process of moving around the world is pretty good (particularly the use of movement abilities obtained by collecting specific monsters), and it's not lacking in things to do, but it could feel so much better if it spread itself a bit wider.
Overall I'm having a really good time. I don't know how deep the game goes yet, but I'm enjoying what's there a great deal.
PS. A couple of things in the UI could be clearer: showing numerical HP values in battle would help, as would giving numerical values for the way that stat-altering moves work. It's a little difficult to know how much value you are getting out of non-damaging moves because only durations are ever shown explicitly, not magnitudes.